Encouraging Offers

Business coalitions also became impatient with the slow process of individual nation commitments. The Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD (BIAC) urged the OECD Trade Committee to get the WTO Secretariat to investigate ways in which GATS negotiations could bypass the process by which each nation makes offers to commit particular service sectors to GATS because this was very slow and painstaking. It suggested a ‘top down’ structure whereby instead of offering sectors for market opening, all sectors would be considered open unless a nation asked for an exception. It also sought ways to have cross-sector issues taken out of the GATS negotiations and made part of the WTO general agreements. An example would be movement of skilled personnel across borders.

Robert Vastine, president of Coalition of Service Industries (CSI) since 1996, also argued that the ‘request-offer’ negotiations should be supplemented with ‘bold and innovative’ negotiating methods such as pressing for commitments that applied across all sectors; ‘the negotiation of model schedules for each sector’; and pro-competitive regulatory commitments. Such regulatory commitments ‘mean abandoning forms of regulation by which governments limit the introduction of new products, restrict use of market-based pricing, and in other ways constrain competition.’